Next of Kin (23 page)

Now, standing facing the bed, she could hear the murmur from the kitchen below. That was the men from the agency, the men Robin had hired while Harry was still in hospital, while they sorted themselves out and decided what they'd do. They were nice enough fellows, even if one wasn't much more than a tractor driver, and since they came some distance each day to work – office hours, Dilys thought scornfully, eight to four-thirty – she allowed them to eat their lunch in the kitchen. That way, she could keep an eye on them, too, see that they really were doing what Robin had told them to, and not slacking. The thought of anyone slacking on land that Joe had put his heart into was anathema to Dilys.

So, to her great discomfiture, was the thought of having Harry back at Dean Place. Every day, when the men had gone home, Dilys tidied herself up and drove in to Stretton Hospital and sat by Harry's bed for an hour. She took him fruit and home-made biscuits and bottles of lemon-barley water. She also took the newspapers, both national and local, and the weekly farming journal he subscribed to, and the Stretton Market reports. She would mix his barley water for him and then she would read to him and tell him what had happened on the farm and peel him an apple, or a banana, and try to get him to eat some. Then, when the hour was up, she would fold up the papers, and put the fruit peels into a plastic bag, and stoop and kiss Harry on the forehead.

‘Now you try and sleep,' she'd say. ‘And eat your supper. You must try and eat your supper. I'll be in again tomorrow.'

Then she'd go and find her car in the visitors' car-park and drive home to Dean Place Farm with a feeling of relief, a feeling of having escaped from someone whom she had had to make conversation to, but who no longer spoke the same language.

Yet she didn't like seeing him in hospital. She didn't like the way hospital seemed to have aged Harry, and made him helpless, diminished him. Dr Nichols had said it was shock that had sent him off the night of Joe's funeral, that grief could cause shock, could be traumatizing and could immobilize ordinary functions and patterns of thinking. Dilys could see that, but it didn't make her feel any more warmly towards Harry, but rather added to her obscure but powerful feeling that he had betrayed her, had let her down in the one part of her life where he knew – he
knew
– she had required unswerving loyalty. It had been almost a pact between them, an unspoken pact, that Joe was the centre of things, the centre of their world, the cradle of their hopes and wishes. Joe had bound them together in a way that Dilys had always assumed Harry understood as well as she did. And then he'd left his gun unlocked. He'd worked alongside Joe all those days and months and years and seen how things were for Joe and still he'd left his gun unlocked. His mulishness in the face of Joe's progressiveness Dilys could forgive, also his readiness to have rows with Joe, to deny him developments he'd set his heart on – but not the gun. Something about the unlocked gun stuck in Dilys's throat and made her thankful for that bed in Stretton Hospital, and for Harry's continuing refusal to eat more than would keep a hamster alive. When they sent Harry home, Dilys wasn't at all sure how she was going to live with him.

‘Missus!' one of the men called from downstairs.

Dilys went out of Joe's room, closing the door, and out onto the landing. At the foot of the stairs, the younger of the two men stood, a gingery young fellow, who lived, he'd told her, with his wife and two young children in his parents-in-laws' council house the far side of Stretton.

‘I'll be off, then,' he said.

She started down the staircase.

‘Off where?'

‘Promised the wife I'd take her mother to the hospital later. For her check-up.'

‘You're supposed to be here until four-thirty,' Dilys said. ‘You know that.'

He scratched his head.

‘Sorry. Sorry about that—'

‘Did you tell Mr Meredith? Did you tell my son?'

‘Slipped me mind—' He shifted, in his stockinged feet. ‘Can you give him a message? Can you tell him the harrow's playing up?'

‘It's new,' Dilys said.

He grinned at her.

‘That's OK, then,' he said. ‘Isn't it? It'll still be under guarantee.'

She put a hand on the newel post at the foot of the stairs. She was suddenly tired and worse, slightly fearful. She said, ‘You go, then.'

He nodded.

‘Might be a bit late in the morning. Nine-ish, maybe—'

Dilys turned her head away.

‘Cheers,' he said. ‘See you tomorrow.'

She waited until he had padded back through the kitchen and out into the yard. He was calling to the other fellow, she could hear him, cheerful and careless. She felt her way slowly back into the kitchen and saw that, although they hadn't left any actual mess, there were two chairs askew by the table, and a screwed-up ball of plastic film and an apple core. She put a hand on the doorframe and leant there. Harry's old dog, from his basket by the back door, raised his head and scented her presence. He was seeking Harry. She closed her eyes. Blind and deaf, old Kep was still seeking something he wanted and needed which wasn't there. Just like me, Dilys thought. She felt the silence of the kitchen surge round her, cutting her off. Just like me.

‘You OK?' Bronwen said, passing Judy's desk with a mango in one hand and a plastic cup of black coffee in the other. ‘You look really tired.'

‘I am a bit—'

‘Want a mango?' Bronwen said.

‘No, thanks. No.'

‘You should book a holiday,' Bronwen said. ‘You need a break. I'm going to Formentera this year, renting a villa with some friends. It's supposed to be really unspoiled.'

Judy looked at her computer screen. ‘The mood this autumn,' she had written, ‘is childlike. The room in all our minds will be the nursery. Think gingham and painted furniture. Think farmyard friezes and rag rugs. Think rocking horses.'

Awful, she thought, awful,
awful
. She clicked the mouse to wipe out the sentences. ‘Do you,' the computer asked politely, ‘wish to save this document?'

‘No!' Judy said, almost shouting.

Bronwen, back at her desk and slicing into the mango with a fragile plastic knife, looked up.

‘Sorry,' Judy said. ‘Sorry. I just wrote such complete crap, that's all.'

‘Did you hear me?' Bronwen said. ‘Did you hear what I said about a holiday?' She held the mango up so that its thick yellow juice ran down her wrists. ‘Christ, I always forget you can only eat these things in the bath.'

‘I've had so much time off,' Judy said. ‘So much, just lately—'

‘But that was
family.
That wasn't holiday. They can't penalize you for – well, for—'

‘For relations dying,' Judy said.

Bronwen manoeuvred a desk drawer open with her elbow and extracted a dented box of tissues.

‘Can't you go somewhere with Ollie?'

‘I don't know. I haven't asked him. I mean, he's done so much just lately, so much propping up—'

Bronwen sank her teeth into a mango-half and tore out a chunk of slippery flesh.

‘Probably likes it. What about Zoe, then?'

There was a tiny pause.

‘Not Zoe.'

‘I thought,' Bronwen said, biting again, ‘I thought Zoe was great.'

Judy remembered the list of grief words on green paper, the midnight talks, Zoe's undemanding, unjudging, almost invisible presence in the flat.

‘She – well, she was.'

Bronwen dropped the skin of half the mango into her wastepaper basket with a wet flop.

‘So what went wrong?'

Judy hesitated. She looked at the photograph of Tideswell Farm, with the heifers in the sunny meadow and the figure who might have been Robin and whose identity, up until now, she hadn't really troubled herself about. Now, looking at the photograph, she wanted the figure by the barn to be Robin definitely, to be able to be certain of it. She peered a little closer. It was too tall a figure for Gareth, but the hair didn't look dark enough for Robin. Gareth's hair was brown, pale mousey brown like weak tea. Perhaps the man by the barn wasn't Robin or Gareth, but Joe. Judy put a hand out and edged the photograph sideways so that the light caught the glass and blotted out the picture. If the man was Joe, Judy could not quite look at him just yet.

‘Well?' Bronwen said. She had finished the second half of her mango and was now licking her fingers, sliding the whole length of them into her mouth, one by one. It was somehow revolting to watch.

‘She's – well, she'd got kind of hooked on my family—'

‘What d'you mean?'

Judy bent her face towards her desk and shielded it from Bronwen with her hands.

‘She wanted to come and stay, to see the farm. So I took her. And then she went back, without telling me, on her own. And now she's gone again.'

‘Wow,' Bronwen said.

‘She did tell me this time,' Judy said and then, struggling to be fair, ‘and she wouldn't come to my uncle's funeral because she said it wouldn't be right. But she went again yesterday. She got the bus.'

Bronwen held her hands away from her.

‘Bizarre,' she said, laying emphasis on the second syllable.

‘I keep thinking she has to be after something. She says she isn't. She says she just likes it.' Judy stopped. What Zoe had actually said, yesterday morning, before departing for the bus station was, ‘It isn't me who has to answer these questions, Jude. It's you. It's you who said you never liked the place, it's you who said your family stifled you. Well, I like it and they don't stifle me. I'm not taking anything that's yours. I'm not even
taking
anything. I'm just going to be there. If your dad says I'm to go, I'll go.'

Judy said now, to Bronwen, ‘There's a bit missing. It all seems so simple when she says it, but it doesn't hang together.'

Bronwen was losing interest. She stood up, holding her sticky hands away from her, fingers spread like Struwwelpeter.

‘I'll have to wash. I've got the bloody stuff almost in my armpits. Shall I bring you a coffee?'

Judy looked at her blank screen. She was supposed to have 500 words as a first draft by twelve for the features editor.

‘No, thanks.'

‘OK,' Bronwen said. ‘Just answer my phone for me, would you? Shan't be a tick.'

Judy nodded. Then she reached out and laid the photograph of Tideswell Farm flat on its face, so that she couldn't see the house or the cows or the man by the barn at all. ‘It isn't my home,' she'd said once to Zoe, almost irritably. ‘It's just the place where I spent my childhood.' Well, Judy said to herself, picking up the computer mouse again,
well
. True or false?

Robin's shotgun lay on the kitchen table. It was broken, and a scatter of cartridges lay beside it that he had taken out of his pocket and dropped there. Zoe had never seen a gun before in real life, and certainly not a long-barrelled gun like this, with its wooden butt and chased-metal plates. It was a completely different thing from guns in the movies, much more old-fashioned and elegant and countryfied. Zoe touched it now and then. Robin said he was going to clean it later, after he'd sorted out some problem he thought he had with the total bacterial count on last month's milkings. It seemed to be very high, he'd said to Zoe, averaging nearly 20. He'd got to go and see somebody about it; check the feed. She didn't know what he was talking about. Sometimes, when he talked farm jargon, she asked him what he meant, but this time she didn't. She had instead looked at the gun lying on the table and wondered if it was the same kind of gun that Joe had used, to kill himself.

Robin had been using his gun last night, he said, to shoot badgers. They were protected, of course, he said, by misjudged town-bred legislation, whose perpetrators didn't have to live with the results. Badgers were fine, Robin said, at a distance and in moderation.

‘But they're dirty beasts and they're coming closer to the house every day, and fouling up the pasture. And they carry TB. Bovine TB. I don't want them round my cattle.'

He hadn't looked at Zoe while he said this. In fact, she noticed, he hadn't looked at her at all since she had arrived three hours before and he had found her in the parlour with Gareth at the end of the afternoon milking.

‘You back?' he'd said, just as Gareth had.

‘Yes.'

He hadn't smiled. He said merely, ‘We could do with extra hands just now,' but he directed the remark more at Gareth than at Zoe.

Gareth was less talkative than usual, too, and his face looked older, somehow, sterner, as if his head was full of harsh, preoccupying thoughts. He said he didn't know what was going to happen, what the future held, what Robin was going to decide, what they'd do over at Dean Place Farm. The old man, Gareth said, looping a milking cluster out of the way to let a cow move on, was still in hospital. Suppose he couldn't farm again? He wasn't very old, Gareth said, but suppose this had knocked him sideways, knocked the stuffing out of him? Robin couldn't run two farms. And he didn't like the arable anyway.

‘Hasn't got any heart to it,' Gareth said, slapping a cow to make her move into a stall. ‘Not like stock. It's a different thing altogether from working with stock.'

It had been on the tip of Zoe's tongue to ask Gareth if he was thinking of leaving. But something in the atmosphere held her back. The whole place felt different this visit, less settled, less certain, as if the future was not in fact the simple and sturdy matter it once had seemed. The mood made Zoe herself feel less certain, too, less able just to ask questions when she felt like it, or climb in and out of these seemingly stable lives at whim, observing them and photographing them as if her presence affected them no more than the touch of a butterfly alighting on a wall. When she left the milking parlour, she had come back into the kitchen and hung about in it, awkward and restless. Before, she would simply have been there, existing, and taken pleasure in the unaffected ease of that. Now, hovering uncertainly round the table on which Robin's gun lay, she felt she was in some alarming nursery fable, and that the forces that ruled the weather and the land had taken the roofs off the houses, too, and soon would blow the walls down, just on a whim, and watch all the little people inside scurrying out in a panic.